The Autumn of the Patriarch
Gabriel García Márquez
An unnamed Caribbean dictator rots inside his palace while the same story of absolute power is told six times over, each version circling closer in. Garcia Marquez called it a poem on the solitude of power, and built the figure out of real leaders including Franco, Duvalier and Juan Vicente Gomez. It is written in very long paragraphs whose sentences change speaker without warning; first published in Spanish by Plaza y Janes in 1975.
Why you should read this
This is the novel Garcia Marquez wrote as a deliberate departure from the accessible realism of his most famous book, built from extremely long, run-on sentences and shifting, unmarked points of view. It is his most formally difficult major novel, and asks real patience of readers expecting a more conventional narrative surface.
- Field
- Literature
- Form
- Fiction
- Published
- 1975
- Themes
- Latin American LiteratureLiterature
